Star Citizen‘s Chris Roberts discusses upping the ante on PC gaming

Say what you will about Chris Roberts, the guy knows how to make an entrance. After spending a decade away from the game business producing movies, the man behind legendary PC space sims like Wing Commander, Privateer, and Freelancer jumped back into the scene with a breathtaking video demo for Star Citizen, a new space sim effort in the same vein as the earlier games for which he's famous. The initial interest in the game was so high that it overwhelmed Robert's servers and brought down the site's proprietary crowdfunding solution for a few days. Since then, the site has come back and the effort has raised over $2.6 million in pledges from fans eager for the spiritual successor to Wing Commander, including over $850,000 more from a Kickstarter set up later.

Why come back to game development now? It's all about the technology, and Roberts tells Ars that the tech has "moved on enough where I felt like I could do a whole different level of fidelity in terms of simulation of the world and the visuals I could deliver on that. I was always very frustrated by that in the past. Now I’m sort of looking at stuff that I could do in real time that, when I was making the Wing Commander movie, we needed millions of dollars of SGI machines and days to render. That’s very exciting to me, because that’s sort of my fantasy, playing something that has the visual fidelity of a movie to it."

Roberts also said he was drawn back by the ability to interact directly with the audience while making the game through forums and extensive websites, a huge change from the more isolated development he was used to in the '90s. "One of the reasons I sort of left the business for a while was because I was feeling increasingly disconnected from my audience," he said. The breaking point came when the 12 to 18 months development cycles Roberts was used to stretched into a four-year slog with Freelancer. "Spending that many years disconnected from your audience, sort of working off by yourself, wasn’t creatively fun for me. I love that [now] I can interact with my community even when I’m developing, because it’s fun. I love what I do.”

To help keep Star Citizen development from dragging on that long, Roberts will be starting with the pre-made CryEngine 3 for Star Citizen. That's a first for Roberts, who has always built new engines for his games from scratch in the past. "This time around, I look at it [and] say, 'I could put a team together, I could build a really good engine, but that’s going to take me two years.' During that time I could be using resources and time to improve an existing engine and also build the features I want specific to my game... If I’m making a movie, I’m not inventing a camera before I use it.”

Living up to the promise

To call Star Citizen ambitious feels like an understatement. In many ways, the game promises to be all things to all gamers. It will provide both a deep single-player experience and an MMO with no monthly fee, complete with an EVE Online style, supply-and-demand based economy to boot. Technically, Roberts promises a realistic physics system and scalable graphics that pack "ten times the details of current AAA games."

It sounds like a lot to promise, especially for a game that is relying on crowdfunding donations to help get it made (Roberts says additional private investment will help push the total budget above $10 million). But Roberts says that, while developing such a massive game is going to be hard, it's not quite as impossible as it might seem.

The Wing Commander connection

It's hard to avoid drawing comparisons between Star Citizen and Wing Commander, the game that first put Roberts on the map. Even though the Wing Commander license is still controlled by Electronic Arts, I had to wonder if Roberts had started out trying to make another game in his established universe.

"I would be lying if I said I didn't have conversations with them off and on, so who knows. But the key for me is to be able to build a universe and curate it and be in charge of it," he said. "If I go back to Wing Commander I have to feel like I’m in a position where I can guide that ship. And of today that’s not the case. But everyone’s cool, so who knows."

Roberts noted how rights issues with Microsoft prevented him from making a sequel that included a lot of the features he wanted to add to that universe, and he wanted to prevent that situation in any new game he makes. "I want to be in a position with Star Citizen or any universe I‘m building [to] curate in a long-term manner. With Wing Commander, it’s EA’s IP, so I’m not in that same situation... That’s why I’m doing Star Citizen."

He had good things to say about his relationship with Electronic Arts, though, and he continues to maintain relationships with former coworkers there. "I know there’s a lot of people who think EA is the big evil publisher, but my experience has been nothing but positive."

Even without access to his Wing Commander IP, Roberts hinted that Star Citizen wouldn't be all that different. "What I’m building is exactly—if I had the IP—what would basically be Wing Commander/Privateer... If you’re a Wing Commander player or a Privateer fan, what I’m building will be 100 percent what you want. The only thing you’ll be missing is the names and the exact universe or fiction, because obviously that’s not something I own."

"Think of what Freelancer had ten years ago. It doesn't have that much less than what I’m promising now," he said. "Rather than 100 on a server, I’m promising a meta-server on top of that can bring it to millions of people."

Unlike other MMOs, where everything has to take place in an engine that can handle hundreds or thousands of people working on a single server, Roberts says he considers the massively multiplayer portion of Star Citizen as "more an in-fiction matchmaking service." The central servers will keep track of things like players' money, items, ship status and current location. It will then use dynamic matchmaking to create separate battle instances when two players cross paths with their ships.

"There’s never a situation where it’s got to worry about 10,000 or 5,000 people being in the same location, like it has to in a traditional MMO," Roberts said. Players will also be able to interact off-ship on planets that serve as "an in-fiction chat room, mission selector, and shop. We could do that with a simple boring Web interface, but that’s not my style. My style is 'let’s make it feel like a persistent world.'"

Business-wise, Roberts said Star Citizen will operate on a Guild Wars II-style model, where players buy the base game and occasional mission packs, but they won't have to pay a monthly fee. And while Star Citizen will offer in-game purchases as part of its business model, Roberts was adamant that there won't be anything in the game that you can't buy solely with in-game money, if you're willing to put in the time to earn it. Those who want to buy their way to a cool in-game setup will probably be limited by a per-month real-world currency cap, Roberts said, but even without that kind of system, there would be limits to how much advantage a Star Citizen player can get by throwing their money around.

"It’s not like an MMO where if you’re at level 80 you’ve got this incredible damage bonus and things like that," he said. "The game is skill based, so how you fly affects what’s going on. There is no undefeatable build of a ship. You could spend a whole bunch of money building an amazing ship with huge weapons and armor, but it’s probably going to be slow. Someone who’s a good pilot spends less money and builds a light, maneuverable ship. Sure, if you hit him one time the lighter ship will blow up, but if you don’t manage to hit him he tags you with 20 hits and you go down."

Power to the PC

Roberts has been quite vocal about targeting Star Citizen as a PC exclusive, for one simple reason: the PC is the only platform that he considers powerful and versatile enough to give the kind of experience he wants.

How real is too real?

Roberts has made much of the realistic physics modeling that he's putting into Star Citizen, but those kinds of statements almost got him in trouble with some eagle-eyed gamers on the Star Citizen forums. The commenters noticed that the video footage from the game didn't seem to show the kind of retro-fire you'd need to steady the ship and balance out the massive thrust coming from the main engines. Turns out, Roberts says, those kinds of small details would actually make the game look less realistic in some ways.

"When you see movies and see how [spaceship] thrusters fire in movies, it’s not really accurate, because usually what would happen is you’d have a really quick fire flicker on and flicker off," he said. "When I had the visual showing what was actually happening in the system, there were lots of thrusters flickering and moving back and forth and it looked kind of buggy... I don’t want to make it exactly what it is in reality, because it looks weird."

While the physical underpinnings are 100 percent accurate, Roberts says, there are still some concessions to gameplay as well. "If you think about Wing Commander, you think about Star Wars, let’s face it, real space battles are not going to be at World War II dogfighter speed. It’s all going to happen at incredibly long range and you’ll never see your opponent, and it will be computers calculating trajectories and that’s not fun… You’re trying to make some things that have some level of realism in them, but at the end of the day you’re trying to build something that’s kind of unrealistic to what space combat would be. I don’t think anyone wants a completely accurate space combat simulator, because that would be boring."

"What I was showing you can’t do on a current generation console," Roberts said of Star Citizen's initial proof of concept video. "You can do most of it on a next generation console, but I can promise you a top-end PC now is already more powerful than what a next generation console is going to be."

The main reason, Roberts says, is memory capacity. "You can’t do that much with 512MB [of RAM on a console], so that constrains a lot of your game design. If I’m building a PC game, I’m going 'Yeah, you need 4GB on your machine.' Of course you’re not going to get all 4GB because Windows is a hungry beast, but you’re getting a lot more than 512MB so it kinds of open up what you can do, what you can fit in memory at the same time, and it changes your level of ambition."

Four gigabytes of RAM might sound like a lot, but keep in mind that Star Citizen isn't set to see a final release for another two years. "I’m looking at the high-end [hardware] today being the 'Normal Gamer' level in two years time," he said. "It'll be kind of like Wing Commander used to be. If you had the extra memory, if you had the 386, it was a better experience, but you could still play it on a 286."

Roberts added that he hopes Star Citizen proves that a high-end PC is good for more than warmed-over ports of games made for the consoles. "I have a high-end gaming rig, but I’ve also got all the consoles, and if someone is making a game for a console first, and it’s being ported to the PC, I’m always buying it for the console. I don’t want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn’t really show my PC off."

"I have an iPhone and I can watch The Dark Knight Rises on it, but I don’t want to watch The Dark Knight Rises on my iPhone—I want to see it in IMAX on a big screen, and I’m willing to spend $18 to see it on the big screen in IMAX versus downloading it for a couple of dollars on my iPhone. I definitely think there’s a PC gaming audience like that.”

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.